Writing is a political instrument.

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.